MAKING A DIFFERENCE. High Profile.

Carrying The Torch

Judith Lichtman Keeps Women And Family Rights On Frontburner

If you ever meet Judith Lichtman, or someone points her out across a crowded room, be sure to go up to her and thank her. Not only will she be modestly pleased but also she deserves it.

As president of the Women's Legal Defense Fund, Lichtman helped lead the 8-year fight for the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), which was vetoed twice by President Bush before being signed into law by President Clinton on Feb. 5, 1993, within weeks of his taking office.

The FMLA guarantees that men and women who work for companies with 50 employees or more may take up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave each year to care for a newborn or newly adopted child, to attend certain seriously ill family members or to recover from their own serious health conditions.

"As I travel around the country, I am moved by people who thank me for family leave and tell me their personal stories about how it's made a difference in their lives," Lichtman says.

"It's wonderful knowing our efforts affect people all over this country and allow them to lead good lives."

One person Lichtman cites is Velma Parness, who worked for the state of California.

"Velma's husband had developed acute leukemia and only had a very short time to live," Lichtman says.

"FMLA coverage allowed her to stay home and care for him for the last weeks of his life. As she says so eloquently, without it she doesn't know what she would have done. It protected her job so that after he passed away she had a job to come back to."

This ability for workers such as Parness "to lead good lives," thanks to the FMLA, is under attack for employees of state and local governments.

The U.S. Advisory Council on Intergovernmental Relations is recommending that state and municipal governments be exempted from extending FMLA benefits to employees because the act is an "unfunded mandate," a law from Washington that the federal government will not fund local governments to enforce.

"The commission has come up with a set of draft recommendations," Lichtman says. "They are not yet final. The Women's Legal Defense Fund takes particular exception to the recommendation that would delete FMLA coverage for all state and local employees.

"We really believe that there is no justification for the recommendation," she says. "No one has shown any data to support the notion that state and local governments are in any way hurt by family and medical leave requirements. If anything, the Family and Medical Leave Commission, which just held a series of hearings and has done extensive research, stresses the opposite."

The White House also has sent a letter to the chair of the commission strongly opposing the draft recommendation.

Lichtman says the latest research by the Family and Medical Leave Commission shows that employers aren't at all burdened to enforce family and medical leave provisions, that it increases employee morale and productivity and "that it is a net plus for their workers and for their own bottom line.

"To have this recommendation come from nowhere hurting workers and public service is really outrageous," she says.

"By and large, opposition to the FMLA is in large measure coming from historic opponents of family and medical leave who are looking for areas of vulnerability that they can then build on in the future. If they win here, then they can parlay that into bigger cutbacks" in employee benefits.

The Washington-based Women's Legal Defense Fund was founded in 1971 to provide legal information and referrals to women who were facing sex discrimination.

The commission may issue its final report in April, Lichtman says. Although there is the threat that Congress could repeal the law, Lichtman doesn't believe that repeal is a possibility.

"People like this law. Voters like this law. It helps families," she says. "It helps workplaces be more family-friendly. I would be at this moment shocked if there was a major political impetus to repeal it.

"The fact is that Family and Medical Leave Act does not benefit only women," she says. "It isn't a `women's medical leave act.' It protects women and men workers. Should a man be disabled by a heavy-duty illness, he would be protected. Should a man take time off for the caregiving responsibility of his parents, he too would be protected. So I want it to be clear that this is a bill that affects men as well as women."

The 55-year-old Lichtman is a fighter. And if she were a boxer, she would lead with her left. Her liberal credentials are impeccable, and she's proud of them. She was born in New York to parents she lovingly describes as "politically progressive people who have influenced me greatly."

Her parents, who still live in New York, "believe wholeheartedly that we were put on this Earth to make it a better place and didn't only preach that, but by word as well as deed lived a life of service to their community and believed that it was what their daughters should do," Lichtman says.